Minor geographies of climate action: hedgerows, children’s storytelling and playful environmental participation

Hedgerows are sometimes prickly, sometimes juicy, everyday features of the landscapes we walk past in daily life. Formed from shrubs, trees and other vegetation, they mark field boundaries, roadsides and gardens, while working as biodiversity corridors, habitats, carbon stores, foraging spaces and allies in flood mitigation. Yet, because they are ordinary, local and easily overlooked, hedgerows rarely command the same public imagination as forests, rivers or charismatic wildlife.This paper challenges the idea of the hedgerow as mundane, reframing it as a lively actor in ecological diversity, cultural imagination and climate pedagogy. Drawing on a long-form Youth Participatory Action Research project with young people who named themselves the “HedgeHunters”, we explore the co-creation of the children’s storybook The Mystery of the Giant Claw. Through Hunter the Hedgehog, Twig the hedgerow and a multispecies cast, young people explored pollution, biodiversity loss, care and human behaviour. We show how playful co-creation can transform overlooked landscapes into sites of connection, creativity, environmental action and climate hope. We argue that hedgerows offer a “minor geography” through which young people can engage with climate change and environmental justice, and that playfulness is a serious mode of climate pedagogy supporting emotion, systems thinking and collective agency.